Shelling

How to spell shelling

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shelling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shelling mean?

1. nounA sustained attack on a place using artillery shells.
2. nounThe act of removing peas, nuts, or similar from their outer casing.

Shelling in a sentence

• The shelling of the port continued for three days.

• The shelling of fresh peas filled the whole afternoon.

• Families sheltered in cellars during the heavy shelling.

• She found the shelling of walnuts surprisingly therapeutic.

Where does shelling come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the verbal noun built on the verb 'shell', which descends from the Old English noun 'sciell', meaning a thin hard outer covering such as a seashell or eggshell. That word came from a Germanic root tied to ideas of splitting and scaling off, related to the same family that gave us 'scale' and 'skull'. The verb sense 'to remove from a shell' grew naturally from the noun, and from the 1600s onwards 'shell' was also applied to hollow metal projectiles filled with explosive, because they resembled hard-cased pods. The military sense of 'shelling', meaning a sustained bombardment with such projectiles, became common during the great artillery wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The spelling keeps the double 'l' because the base word ends in two l's, and adding '-ing' simply preserves them.

How the word is built

• shell (Old English sciell: a hard outer covering)
• -ing (forming a gerund/verbal noun)